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Samhain138 writes "It seems like Firefox has finally reached 10 million downloads, just a bit over a month after Firefox 1.0 was released. Congratulations!" My favorite extensions (not all of which worked when 1.0 first came out) are all working happily now, too; the latest nightly has been working flawlessly for me all of today.

No, the work's not over yet, and I think it's time to focus attention on Thunderbird, because Outlook Express is also a security risk. Just replacing IE on a machine won't be enough, in my opinion.

Now, I've not had as good an experience with Thunderbird as with Firefox, so that's a problem. Large message databases that open very quickly with OE take on the order of 10-15 seconds with Thunderbird 1.0, which is a significant difference. That could give newbies a bad impression of TB, even though feature-wise it's way ahead of OE.

I have been using Thunderbird since about 0.4. It is my primary email and non binary usenet reader application and has been since I first started using it. At home, all of my accounts are IMAP and although I have some very large folders, it works very good and no difference in speed from OE, Eudora and several other IMAP capable readers I've used. At work I use on my Linux desktop to connect to our Exchange server via IMAP and it does seem to take a little long to open large folders (more then 1000 mails and some up to several 1000) that have not been accessed for a long time. Of course, I do not have an option to compare that exact setup to OE.

IIRC thunderbird, like mozilla before it uses mbox, which is basically a flat mail file. I dont think any mail client quite handles large mbox files fast. OE and O are 'faster' for those things as they are in a proprietary database and indexing there of. So you have a plus with mbox as being portable, human readable, and 'repairable' with a text editor the con of being slow with large files.

With a DB you have fast access, and compression capabilities, but its no longer human readable.

Even if you index and mbox i think you are still going to get a lag reading a large text file.

Firefox (gecko) is an OS-independent platform for application development. We're already seeing some fairly sophisticated apps being developed using the browser as the platform (Gmail and Flickr for example), and that trend will take off if Firefox (and technology like Xforms) reaches critical mass. Microsoft could find themselves in a situation where almost all new software development for the desktop

XUL, XPCOM, excellent JS support, DOM Inspector, standards compliance. Mozilla has some great stuff too. You can't get everyone to switch from IE to Moz, but you can't get everyone to switch from Moz to IE either at this point.

But those hardcore techs(XUL, XPCOM, etc... for Moz, and the ones you mentioned for IE) just rock for dev

no, AC, it's not a "pure troll" - I don't do "pure troll." I might, at times, speak some vague dialect of troll. But this was not one of those times.

I was being serious.

Ten million downloads is impressive. And it is nice to think that people might finally be looking at non-Microsoft ways of using the Web and Net. That's wonderful. But shit, it's been over three years since I was using Nightly Builds of anything. If shit ain't working by now...it probably isn't worth working on.

Ah, now that was a wee bit offsides, now wasn't it? A bit trollish?

Still, the more trollish posts are the "none of this matters! IE still 0wnZ the m0z!" Go flame them, Cowboy. And maybe even put some of your precious Karma at risk to do it.

My post is based on ten years worth of waiting on Netscape updates. I remember being excited by 2.0. Those were the days. This is just candy for hyperactive neo-nerds of the new century. Fuck 'em. Call me at the major release dates and don't give me a shitty product, ok?

We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.

I also hope, the firefox/mozilla team does not rest on its laurels, and create new features and innovations which can be used as the basis for the next generation of web applications (the last ones were when there was a competetion of sorts between IE and NS)

We need to keep up with this momentum to make firefox the standard browser.

No you don't. You need to keep up with this momentum to make Firefox a standard browser.

Make anything the one and only standard, and you're back to a monoculture, with all the potential problems that embodies. (Yes, I know that Firefox would by its nature be a much more benign monoculture, but that wouldn't prevent those problems.)

Firefox is a great app, and I'm very pleased for its success, but it's not The One True Browser. Instead, it's the browser that's good enough to show that there's a whole family of True Browsers, and that once people start coding to standards we all benefit, whether we user Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Lynx, or whatever.

The real victory is keeping the variety high enough for websites to be kept from specializing on any given browser. As long as alternatives total more than about 10%, most sites can't afford to require that people use IE.

but i've had a few complaints... one being it crashes a whole lot more than ie does, two it takes a bit longer to get it to start up for the first time - not a big deal, but a little annoying, and three embedded windows media files won't seem to play at all.

I don't believe I've ever seen IE itself crash. But when I was using Windows 2000 beta with IE 5.0, crashes were frequent. As soon as I upgraded to IE 5.5, crashes almost vanished. Remember, IE is part of the operating system on Windows, so any crash you experience might be an IE crash whether you realize it or not. And when Firefox crashes, it doesn't tend to take the whole OS down with it.

Good fscking riddence if it is given the appalling implementation of CSS in IE that MS claims is "standards compliant". I've just put together a CSS based website using Firefox to do my initial development. OK, I'm a little on the cutting edge with the design, but Opera, Safari and Konqi all manage at least a passable stab at rendering it - nothing that you'd know was a problem unless you knew to look for it. IE, on the otherhand, is just so far out there you wouldn't believe with radically different renderings between platforms, IE versions, even Service Pack levels, and don't even get me started on "Quirks" and "Standards" modes...

Total time to develop website - 1 week. Total time to hack the CSS/HTML about to get it working in at least a reasonable number of IE varients - five weeks and counting... Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless! To develop a standards compliant website, there's open source, for anything else there's Microsoft...

I have, from personal experience, found out that IE is the most CSS compliant of all browsers available.

Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is. The same holds true for all the other rendering engines of course, each has their own quirks and issues, but at least they are getting stomped on with each successive release. Unless Microsoft changes its plans again (very possible) we're not likely to see much improvement

But by a similarly exaggerated amount I downloaded one copy and deployed it onto 8 million PCs, so it probably balances out. 10m downloads is all very impressive, but I don't see any way of converting that into the actual userbase that would be any more reliable than taking a guess. In addition to the above cases you've also got people that have since removed it (wait till the next IE exploit, fools!), installs onto multiuser systems, those that have installed from magazine cover disks, third party package archives or distro updates.

Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...

Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...

The OEMs have shipped tens of millions of XP systems since August with IE 6-SP2 as the default. Despite all the fuss and fume on Slashdot, the rollout of SP2 has gone pretty well. I'd not be greatly surprised to see Firefox stall out at about it's current market share.

Three copies for me, one for each of my systems. Unfortunately still have to use IE at work, but working on that.:(.

Before Firefox, I would routinely, between Ad-Aware and Spybot, be cleaning up 50-100 spyware/adware infections a week between the machines. (This was with IE set to high security.) After switching to Firefox, the highest weekly total (between all the systems) has been five.

Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute. If I needed any proof that Firefox is a superior, faster, more secure browser, this has certainly been it. I'll never use IE again.

Firefox typically opens within a couple seconds of clicking whatever needs to use it. I routinely had IE take half a minute.

Ok, I use Firefox as my main browser on Windows, OSX and Linux. I rarely use IE on Windows for any reason any more, BUT it launches instantly when I do use it. This is much faster than Firefox, and understandable since much of it is already loaded after bootup. If you really were waiting for 30 seconds for IE to come up, then something is seriously screwed up on your system...

I've got several windoze machines, 2 of which have not been "re-installed" in quite some time, and both load IE almost instantly, whereas Firefox is a slow boat to... I'm curious why... but the more I use Firefox, the more I don't care.

Because you might be using web applications that make use of ActiveX controls or have web pages that use other IE-specific features. If you've built an entire corporate infrastructure using IE, you might be tied to IE for a while.

Oh, technically, I could install it quite easily. I have admin rights to that system. However, I would not have to worry about using -any- system at work shortly thereafter, since, for one, our POS system currently relies on connecting through an ActiveX interface, and, secondly, my boss gets pissy if I change -anything- on the system unless it is obviously and totally broken.

So, short answer is, 1, we're tied to it, for now, and 2, I would prefer to use IE at work then have no work.

And the most useful extension, SessionSaver, still isn't available for 1.0. The old version, if you can still find it, mostly works okay though. A site to grab it from is here [pikey.me.uk]. I hear a rumor that there's a SessionSaverPlus in the works which will fully work with 1.0, but I haven't seen any code yet. Any news on this?

In total? Im sure a good portion of those are redownloads. Lost backups, reformats, new versions released. Unless this is only counting the download of Firefox 1.0
What about mirrored downloads though? Im sure there are other places to download it, besides the mozilla website.

I don't get why FireFox even bothers messing with the pdf plugin. The damn plugin doesn't even work reliably with IE. They should do what Opera does and just hand over the pdf file to the OS so it can launch Acrobat Reader (or Ghostview, or whatever you got installed).

Granted that IE is a security nightmare...but Firefox 1.0 with it's extensions and plugins has been a nasty problem on my windows machine. Running it on my windows machine causes a lot of paging and CPU activity- so much so that the machine hangs. It stays slow even after I kill firefox.

I didn't have any of these problems on Linux. I am not sure if it is Firefox or it's extensions or plugins.

If your machine becomes slow due to firefox, that is one thing....but if it stays slow after you killed firefox, then you should either consider ditching Win9x, or if you are running NT base, then you should look for a real source of the problem.

Not the same issue as the person's who I am responding to. This bug is basically all about firefox getting paged out to disk, which will cause slow waking time.

However, the person was experiencing major slowdown to the point of hangs with firefox killed. If he really killed firefox, then how is it a problem with firefox, unless he runs a crappy OS, such as win9x.

Besides, as for your bug, this is what is really driving me to find a smaller browser on my laptop:

Firefox does have some memory leaks, but if the problem is happening quickly it is probably a combination of the plugins and extensions. Check for updates on the plugins and try living without the extensions. Aside from User Agent Switcher, I've uninstalled all my extensions. While nice, few of them match the level of professionalism of the core product.

Avary landed on Trunk a few days ago, so there's significant improvements in the 1.0+ version which will go on to be developed towards 1.1, though likely less stable and with a whole hoast of new bugs people are already reporting that it's got faster page load times.

They include the December statistics, and it has already increased more than in the past month, and it's still only 12th of December...

It's interesting to compare to the usage in e.g. January 2004.

Of course, W3Schools is a web site not really representing the Internet population at large, but it is a community that consists of a whole lot of web masters teaching themselves to code for the web we'll see tomorrow. I hope these are signs of what to come and we'll have less incompatible web sites in the future.

2004 has truly been a year the Mozilla Foundation has been doing great, and it will be very interesting to see what will happen in 2005!

OK, I'm bored and have a spreadsheet to hand, so I've dropped the data into a spreadsheet, generated a graph and added an exponential trendline to Mozilla. It tracks the recorded data quite nicely from January 2002 through to July 2004 at which point the recorded data actually starts to climb increasingly *above* the curve. Assuming that the current momentum is maintained, the trend line shows Mozilla passing 50% of total browser share aroun

And by 2007 there will be three people using Firefox for every two computers in the world, By 2008 there will be 14 billion people using Firefox. By 2015 there will be more copies of Firefox in use than protons in the observable universe.:-)

MS has given up on IE. Someone is going to come up with the killer extension to Firefox and then it will gain even more momentum. Tabbed windows was a great start. At first I thought it was a stupid idea, and then I tried it and realized how wrong I was. IE hasn't

Sourceforge's Top Downloads [sourceforge.net]
eMule, the top project, has 80 million downloads. Gaim, for all its awesomeness, has about 5 million. I'm not farmiliar with how they track these statistics, but I assume that is for all versions over its entire lifetime. As with the FF downloads, this is easily skewed by people downloading it more than once, or from a different source.

That's because most Linux GAIM users have it bundled with their Linux distribution, or download it from their package manager instead of through SourceForge.

Most Windows users, quite frankly, will use the official client, myself included. Somehow I feel that the official client will work better with the AIM servers than GAIM - its innate/"gut feeling"; don't bother trying to convince me otherwise. I'm glad to use GAIM when on Linux, but AIM feels better

Although I personally am responsible for about 10 of those downloads - a claim that I'm sure that most slashdotters can share.

I really wish that the Extension Room [mozdev.org] was more carefully maintained though. As an example, I looked at the RSS extensions recently, and found that 2 out of 3 did not work. One was even version 0.0.1! With extensions that can't install, or even worse, cause problems, it really tarnishes the quality of the work that went into Firefox itself.

If you happen to care that people start using some browser other than IE, there is a simple thing that you can do that will help convince people to switch, stop supporting IE.
All of my friends who want free tech support from me know that if they use IE, they get no sympathy from me.
None of the websites that I develop personally are tested with IE, they get a small message saying "this site has not been tested with Internet Explorer, and may not work as expected. If you want to be sure you are getting the

Does FireFox send information when it is installed, or is it just through the Mozilla website? If the latter, then it wouldn't help for organisations that download a single copy and distribute, or downloads from mirrors (such as the default for Gentoo using emerge).

Nightly builds are currently suffering from some instability after the recent branch merge (lots of features only lived on the branch until now, and only recently became available on the trunk, like extension/theme manager and find bar). If you're a happy 1.0.0 user, it might be advisable to stick with that for a while until the nightlies stabalize a bit more. A list of important bugs and fixes can be found here [nyud.net]

I'm always asked to help clean up friends computers, get rid of spyware, adware, etc. What I always do is download Firefox (along with Adblocker) and then go through the whole system and change all of the Firefox icons to IE icons. (I also set them up with a good filter for Adblocker) The real IE shortcut I dump in the trash and delete. I then tell my non-tech friends that "I fixed the internet" so that they won't see ads, won't get popups and will be much more protected against spyware. If I feel someo

Does anyone know where I can get a glibc 2.2 build? Will it even work on systems that weren't released within the last 2 years?

As a side note, I find it pretty annoying that I'm getting left behind with my RH 7.3 system. I was getting by ok building.src.rpms but I'm starting to run into problems. I just wanna get s**t done but I'm going to have to "upgrade" now just because some bum thinks everyone has xft.

Honestly. If you can't be bothered to upgrade your OS in two years, then it's time to learn the wonderful command

make

First, there's no doubt in my mind that I've been coding C probably longer than you've been alive (and I'm not suggesting that I'm old).

Second, I just stated that I have been building.src.rpms ('.src' means "source code" as in what you run 'make' on) but newer apps are starting to require stuff that should probably be a optional (e.g. xft).

Going beyond that, most mainframes have software written in the 1970s (or maybe earlier) that runs unrecompiled on the latest release of the OS, and it does it transparently recompiling objects to take advantage of the new hardware (e.g., the IBM AS/400 went to 64-bit in 1995. All existing 48-bit code (that wasn't stripped) was transparently recompiled to use the 64-bit architecture.)

I probably am the last person here to figure this out, but in the last two weeks, I have grown to love two features of Firefox I wasn't aware of before:

Open in Tabs. Make a bookmark folder of the websites you want to be open when you sit down and start browsing. When opening that folder the Bookmarks menu, use the last entry -- "Open In Tabs" -- and go get your coffee. When you come back, the browser is ready: All the sites are nicley pre-loaded in tabs.

RSS Feeds. If you haven't tried this yet, do yourself a favour and do so. For those clueless people like me, what you do is click the little RSS button on the bottom right of the browser, which creates a new bookmark folder. Inside that folder, the links to the stories of the day are created automatically for that site.

Yeah, I know, you've been doing this for ever, what's next, Nice2Cats will discover these things called fax machines. But for slow people like me, this is just awesome. Combine this with the adblock extension, and there is no way in hell IE can compete anymore.

The infamous 100% cpu usage bug. It has been present at least since 0.9 and occurs frequently and seemingly at random though usually it's when it's "loading" a page. It gets stuck and usually, closing the tab is not enough and i have to restart the browser.

Don't get me wrong, I love my firefox but it's annoying as hell to constantly find out that the reason my computer has been running so slow for the past 5 minutes or the reason this game i launched is giving me 10 fps is because firefox did it again (and again, and again...like the duracell rabbit)

I'm not the only one complaining about this and I 'm still waiting for a fix. (amd64 3200+, 1 gb ram)

I seem to have this problem whenever I wake the machine back up from sleep mode. It's kind of obnoxious - I can type something, leave for a minute, come back, and it'll just be finishing *displaying* what I typed in.

Apparently, it was delayed because they were changing it and adding much more of something (signatures or something I believe) than originally planned. Still, it probably won't be more than a few months away at most.
Honestly though, this is just to flaunt it in Microsoft's face. I doubt that many people will be convinced to get Firefox from an ad in the Times, but it certainly won't hurt.

Well, mileage may vary. In contrast, my non-geek website is showing IE's share down to about 85%, with Firefox up to 5.7% and Mozilla up to 3%. We get about 60,000 unique visitors a month, so I feel comfortable in using the log benchmarks (AWStats) as at least a semi-definitive source when I look at the browser stats these days. It's enough traffic to provide a significant data set.

Indeed. Looking at the stats for Stuff.co.nz [stuff.co.nz] - one of New Zealand's largest news sites - I see Firefox currently at around 8-9% and the total for all of Mozilla at around 13-14%. That's on traffic of around 7-8 million hits per day.

Except for the fact that Apache is the standard, and because of its design philosophies, it has proven to be far more secure than IIS, despite having a much larger install base (and thus, according to your theory, more people attacking it).

iexplore.exe is just a stub. The majority of the code is in a.dll file (whose name escapes me at the moment) that is loaded by explorer.exe (i.e., the shell itself). So the fact that iexplore.exe means nothing.